I grew up in a single parent household pretty much.
My whole high school years meant me and my pops didn't really have a good relationship.
For me, it was definitely the time where my life was going down the wrong path.
Pretty much I hung around all the dudes in the hood that sold dope.
So we, you know, those were my role models.
And that was family for me.
You know, it was points where I really hated my pops, man.
That joint man really affected me and messed with my identity.
What I all really started was, I used to babysit his family.
And one of the kids, he really loved art.
So every time I would come to his house to babysit, he would ask me to draw something.
Literally the whole time I'm babysitting, I would be drawing.
You know, I can draw, but you know, I think I want to try this painting stuff out.
So I bought a couple canvases from Utrecht in the city and went to the crib and just
started going in.
What I did was I started identifying things that I liked and started painting those things.
This project we're working on is the first installment of paintings centered around
the villains from Disney movies.
The more that I started to think about the idea, I started to think about the circumstances
of these villains and the first one in particular that I thought of was Ursula.
And I started to think like, well, maybe one day what if she wasn't always evil?
Even in the movie, she's combating in the fighting area because of how she looks.
I just see it as just some benefit of just telling the stories of these characters in
another way.
Today's been a good day, man.
I haven't been painting that long, sometimes I get a little nervous like how it's gonna
turn out.
I feel like this whole piece in this art show is gonna be like a stepping stone career-wise
as an artist.
I think a lot of people will be impacted by what we're doing and I got really hot hopes
for it and I expect, you know, the response to be pretty good from it.
This marked the beginning of something special in me, me dealing with my issues with identity,
but then also as an artist creatively, just being more creative, stepping outside the box,
doing more art that kind of challenges the culture from the standpoint of the art and
just the content behind it and the cause behind it.
For me, that's the biggest thing with the art is that, you know, when people look at
it that they see, it's cool and it's dope, but, you know, they get the idea behind it
and get inspired by it and get challenged.
We're just in a good position, man, just to really impact people and I couldn't even
be any more happier with the progress of day one.
So it's day two.
Out in Philly, today I'm gonna just start off with the hair and go into finishing up
the face and I kind of got like a cool idea of how to like bring out the best of the project
through this picture with something that I was like sketching this morning while I was
thinking about it.
So I'm excited just to finish the piece and just ready to get it in.
When you look at the painting, of course, you just think it's fun and you might not
think there's no meaning behind it or it's just all fun and game, but I think that's
what's gonna draw people in, just the colors and because it's so vibrant, they're gonna
look at it and then they're gonna see the detail, they're gonna see the tears and they're
gonna see the donut in their mouth and they're gonna see all these things that's going on
and then that's gonna start the conversation and they're gonna ask questions.
What was the inspiration behind the sprinkles, the bubbles, the donut, the tears?
So I added the donut and I said, if I'm gonna add the donut, I gotta add it like, you know,
it's she's eating a bunch of them, so I gotta have donuts floating around and the sprinkles
floating around in the ocean.
The fact that she's eating these donuts to medicate and the fact that I added tears and
that the fact that she's showing emotion about it exemplifies that this is something she
don't want to do.
I'm telling the story how I want to tell it.
The main thing is I wanted to touch on identity.
This is just a thing that everybody struggles with, not just these Disney characters.
Most of the time, we're just trying to impress people we don't even know.
If you just look at the little mermaid and you lined it up with society, Ariel will
be the one that has a good job, has the favor with people just because she was beautiful.
She had a small shape, so of course she would have more favor probably than Ursula, you
know, and I see Ursula and I see, you know, she's big, she's evil, she's mean, bitter,
you know, it has all these anger issues.
I started to look a little bit deeper and started to think and ask questions like, she
probably wasn't always that wet.
Circumstances probably happened in her life that drove her to become this person.
What if she looked like Ariel when she was growing up?
What if she was skinny?
You know, I had dreams, aspirations.
If I took her out of the Disney movie and just looked at her as a human being, I would
just say I know a lot of people like this, you know, who are bitter, do something that
may have happened with them and they medicated through different things.
Some may medicated through eating, some may medicated through sex or some may medicated
through gambling or smoking, whatever.
For me, you know, I was at a point where I was depressed, I would eat candy bars like
all day and you might think that's like something that's small but, you know, it could have
turned into something else.
It resonates with me people, you know, who struggle with stuff like that and how they
try to use food to hide or food to, you know, make themselves feel better.
What I try to do with the piece is try to showcase that.
Ursula is probably a person that we see in a Burger King or in a dining hall at a college
who's eating and stuffing her face and you just look at her and are turned off.
It's probably some things that's going on in her that she's just trying to deal with
and she doesn't know how to deal with them.
That's what I just want to portray with this whole project that there's so many people
out there who have so many things going on in their hearts with nobody to talk to, nobody
asking them questions, nobody who really cares or has any type of concern and I want to make
sure that as an artist that I do projects that kind of tells the story of those people
and I think this is one of those stories that needs to be told and through that my story
is being shared as well.
